THE LAND
BUZZARD’S ROOST
“Ain’t much on talkin’,” my Pa always said. ‘Round here, running your mouth did nothing but get you in trouble with the law. Our line of work don’t mix with no government. You see, we’ve been makin’ bourbon whiskey for hundreds of years. My kin is Scotch-Irish, but in my eyes, the mountains raised me. I owe everything I’ve got to God and the Knobs of Kentucke. I know the best springs that trickle out rich limestone water and can walk in them woods under the cover of night better than my best bird dog.
The Chicago Run of 32
The summer of 1932 scorched Chicago, where the Democratic National Convention thrummed with raw ambition, deceit, and danger. Jesse Spalding, Howardstown’s sharpest politician and whiskey dealer, stood at the heart of the storm, his eyes burning with dreams of power. His special recipe whiskey, smoother than a summer breeze, was the obsession of Chicago’s underworld. With Al Capone locked away in Alcatraz since 1931 for tax evasion, mob bosses like Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello turned to Jesse to flood the convention with Howardstown’s finest, aiming to loosen delegates’ tongues and sway votes to crown Franklin D. Roosevelt as the Democratic nominee.
THE LIFEBLOOD OF AN
ISOLATED COMMUNITY
In the early years of the twentieth century, a traveler approaching Howardstown from the direction of New Haven would have followed a narrow road that dipped and climbed through the Knobs of southern Nelson County. The landscape was one of conical shale hills rising three or four hundred feet above narrow valleys, their slopes clothed in hardwood timber, their bottoms rich with corn and tobacco. At the center of this pocket of land lay the Rolling Fork River, the southernmost major branch of the Salt River system, a stream that both sustained and periodically imprisoned the people who lived along its banks…